Last night at my church’s Ash Wednesday service, our pastor read from the Book of Joel, chapter 2. Verse 17 reads in part:
“Do not make your inheritance an object of scorn, a byword among the nations.”
Yet America, here we are.
We are an object of scorn and ridicule, and deservedly so.
From a farce of a State of the Union address to the president’s threat to ignore the First Amendment and punish protests on college campuses, to the persistent gutting of our government, we deserve all the enmity we’re getting.
It wouldn’t matter what others said if we treated our citizens and our allies fairly.
We wouldn’t care about the opinions of others if we weren’t promoting fascism, and making the world safe for dictators, bigots, misogynists, nativists, and zealots.
America doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
What we say and don’t say, do and don’t do has consequences that reverberate.
We are not post-World War II America.
Even as flawed and hypocritical as we were then, promoting freedom and justice abroad when we didn’t have consistent freedom and justice at home, we still led the world.
We might have been hypocrites, but we held the moral high ground.
The blood of genuine patriots soaked European and Asian soil.
Patriots of every color, religious and non-religious belief, and all sexual orientations fought and died to keep the world free.
They weren’t draft-dodging windbags acting like would-be gangsters.
They weren’t billionaires enhancing their personal fortunes from the coffers of ordinary people.
They believed in America or at least believed in the promise of America.
Those who believed in the promise of America believed that one day, the country would make good what it said on paper.
Those who believed in the promise of America believed that one day, the country would rise up to the true meaning of its creed.
They believed that one day, the country would value all of its citizens, not some of them.
They believed that equality and fairness for all would be achieved and cemented in permanent, unchangeable laws, precepts, and statutes.
That day hasn’t come and now, it won’t come for a while.
The promise, the hope of that day dawning is much further off.
We never lived in a just society, but it was more just than it is today.
We never lived in a free and equal society, but it was freer and more equal than it is today.
Dr. King’s dream had not come true, but it seemed to be on the horizon – a distant horizon perhaps, but one could visualize it.
We must press on.
We must agitate.
The world relies on our leadership, our acumen for setting the pace for justice and freedom, never perfectly, but better than anyone else.
We must change our course for the sake of the world, and also for us at home.
Those of us live on and beyond the margins.
We need a return of the old, imperfect America.
It must return so that dreamers can continue to dream.
Visionaries can continue to cast their nets.
And we can work toward that more perfect union that has always been just beyond our grasp.